The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Landing On My Feet, Teaching and Learning During a Career in Education by James Kleiner
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00:28 Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hello, folks, Voss here from the EchrisVos Show.com. Please, you know, and things of that makes official welcome to 18 years for Chris Voss show and all the wonderful stuff we're talking about today with the most amazing authors and minds that we have in the show that come on to improve the quality of your life and enhance it.
00:54 We don't bring conspiracy or crazy bat shittery on the show. We just bring smart darn people. support the show. Go to Goodrease.com, Fortresschusch, Christfoss, LinkedIn.com, Fortresschusch, Christfoss, YouTube.com, Fortresschusch,christfoss, Facebook.com, Forchest, Chris Foss. The oldest living podcast still broadcasting, one to two new shows today. We're an amazing young man on the show. We're talking about his book called Landing on My Feet, Teaching and Learning during a Career in Education by James Kleiner. We're going to get into with him and all the deets and all that good stuff. He is a gentleman who has, let's
01:30 see. I'm trying to find a space here. James served as a career educator in the Connecticut public schools for 33 years. During those years and up to the present day, he has been an active professional musician, and he has continued to be a woodward or woodwind instructor at a local prep school. Jim has always had a strong belief in the value of music and the arts in his students' lives. Welcome to the show, Jim. How are you, sir? I'm fine, Chris. Great to be here with you. Great to have you as well. Give us your dot-coms. Where can people find out more about you on the interwebs? All right. My website is landing on my feet.com. One word.com. Okay. And then give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside this book, please?
02:18 This book is a memoir about my teaching career. As I was beginning to plan it and write it and make outlines and so forth, I realized this. so much that I owe to the teachers that I had as a student. So I said, okay, I'm going to plug in some what I call recollections, short chapters about those people as well, especially in the first third of the book. That I did, and I was amazed through this whole process that I remembered as much as I did, because we're talking about back in my first Claire. It was in the late 50s. I was 10 years old. But I had had, I'm known as the greatest pack rat in Connecticut. I've got all sorts of stuff that I saved from my elementary days, from all the way through school, and then I've got all kinds of plan books and roster roles
03:19 and things like that all during my teaching career. So I got out all that stuff, and that really jogged my memory about a lot of things. So it has. helped tremendously. But I thought this was something that I kind of had in the back of my mind for years. I retired in 2015, and after my last concert in the school I taught at, as I was driving home, I thought, boy, I've got to do this. And that was not knowing what I was getting into, as far as being a newbie writer, and how do you write a memoir? And, you know, all those things that they hit me later on, I sat down to really do it. So what was the component that prompted you?
04:07 What was the aha moment where you're like, gosh, darn it, I'm going to write a book. Yeah, it was being on Facebook, I started connecting with former students. And some of them were telling me, hey, boy, thanks so much for the years that you taught me and this and that. And I was telling a bit, I learned a lot from you folks, too, you know, as being a teacher. So that kind of got me interested in wanting to do this. And I was getting encouragement from those people and also from friends and family and everything else. Yeah, go for it. Do it. So that's where I really started the whole process.
04:47 And I thought this memoir would be a good, a couple of different reasons. Number one, it would end up being a really good reference for people that are thinking about going to teaching, or teachers that are early in their career. Maybe they could learn from some of the experiences that I had. I had a lot of bad experiences and a lot of great experiences. And then also, too, I thought maybe it would be interested for the general public to know what it was like to be a teacher through 44 years. Not that I taught every year, but I taught for 33 of those years, and how the teaching field developed through those decades. Yeah, my mom was a teacher for nearly 20 years in elementary school, and, yeah, she would keep me up to par on things that, you know, the changes, and, yeah, it was kind of interesting how for a long time when I grew up, if you said something wrong to your teacher or behaved badly in class,
05:50 or weren't doing well, it was my fault. And everybody would have a meeting to talk about my fault. And then it kind of crossed her teacherdom, it's flipped where anything that was wrong with the student was the teacher's fault. And suddenly they were expected to be parents. So you guys had a pretty interesting row of changes and stuff there for you. Yeah, yeah, I experienced those things. I wrote about them.
06:17 and I must say that I got into teaching gradually as I went through high school and so forth, again, being inspired by the teachers that I had, and went through with it, went to State University of New York College that was very at Fredonia, New York, that was very, very highly thought of as a professional teaching college. So I got through there. I had a wonderful wonderful student teaching experience and then went on to grad school and that's how I ended up in Connecticut. I'm originally from Long Island and I grew up in Hicksville, Long Island, which was post-World War II. My dad was a World War II veteran and the Navy and bought a house in the town of Hicksville and it was Levitt houses, all the row houses in a row. And back in, it cost my dad
07:15 $8,500 for this house. Wow. Like, 1950. Wow. And that just goes to prove how things have changed over the years. But I had a wonderful preparation, and I knew that really that this was, some people have told me, teaching is not a profession, it's a calling. And it called you.
07:39 That was the reason for the idea for the book. And then the interesting part, too, I've. found was that I was faced with actually writing. And when I was in junior high school, we had a future occupation survey. They were trying to figure out what would be your future occupation. So we answered all these questions, so forth. So the number one thing that came up was, for me, was a musician. And the number two thing that came up was a writer. Hmm. And I, okay. And I kind of had the back of my mind. So the first thing I did, this was between 2015 and 2017-18, as I was making outlines and stuff, I thought, let me read a couple of, let me read some books about how to write a memoir, for instance.
08:32 Okay. So I went down the local bookstore and I picked up a couple of books, how to write a memoir, memoir writing and so forth. I came across a very interesting book written by none other than Tony Danza, the actor. And Tony Danza had, when he was, this was post his TV and movie times, he always wanted to be a teacher. And so he thought, he was 50 years old by that time, he said, let me try this. So he went to a high school in Philadelphia and approached the principal and said, hey, I'm doing this kind of a documentary film. And it's called Teach.
09:24 And I would love to be able to do a year of teaching in your high school. So he did. He signed up. He got going and he wrote a book about it. And then he actually had a reality show for a while. called Teach. So I read that book and I saw myself, I saw the experiences that he was going through. And that really inspired me as well. I read, and by the way, he was very successfully, got through it, but he had the normal problems that a new teacher has that we all had.
09:57 Oh yeah. And so then I went to, I found a book called memoir writing for dummies. The old series that you can get. There's probably a podcasting for dummies out there somewhere. I don't know. Probably, yeah. But it was written by a college professor, and it was actually very, very informative. It was like taking a college course. So that really got track, too.
10:25 Nice. Yeah. And I think the third book that really influenced me was on writing by Stephen King. Okay. And this book, he talks about how he goes through the writing process. And I found out the book was very, very informative, very funny. He's a really funny guy. Oh, yeah.
10:45 And how he got into how he got into writing himself. And one of the big things he said in that book was, don't delay. Start writing. Yep. Stop planning. Start writing. Yep. And then part of this book, is an homage to some of the people who inspired you.
11:04 Tell us about those that inspired you and work with you as a teacher. I had, I went back to the third grade, and they gave a music aptitude test to all the third graders. And I remember my mom getting a call saying, your son got the highest grade in our elementary school on the music app. So we're going to offer you a school instrument for next year in the fourth grade. So you can start playing, he can start playing an instrument. I was all excited. So my first choice was the trumpet, and my second choice was the clarinet. You didn't have any school trumpets available, but they had a school clarinet.
11:42 Okay. So in the fourth grade, I started the clarinet. And I started the clarinet with a fellow by the name of Val of you, who was the music director of the elementary school that I was at, Forklane School. And Val was a trumpet player, but he was like I was eventually going to be trained in how to teach all of the woodwind and brass instruments. And so he did a really good job getting me going on the clarinet. And then by the time I was in sixth grade, my parents said, gee, Jim's doing really, it's got a great interest in this. So let's get him a private teacher.
12:21 I had a fellow named him, Jerry Burekopf, start private lessons with him. I studied with Jerry all the way through my senior year in high school. And in the meantime, I had Valague again when I was in ninth grade. What's called Ague? Valague was the name of the teacher. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, Valigue.
12:42 And Val was a no-nonsense, tough love kind of teacher. And I made mental notes about that because he didn't stand for any bad stuff from kids, but at the same time, we knew he loved us. Just feel it. So then I went to high school. I had Jay David Apt, and then I had John. Jerry Pellaron, and they were both terrific teachers, and they were both by Jay David Apt and Jerry Burekoff were graduates of Fredonia. So they steered me to that school.
13:19 At that school, I started studying clarinet with a fellow by the name of Dr. William Willett. And Dr. Willett also conducted the college orchestra there, and he taught me clarinet for a semester, for two semesters. But then he left the school for a job opportunity. So I ended up eventually when I graduated Fredonia. I called Dr. Willett, who was by that time at the Hart College, Heart School of Music in University of Hartford. He said, he was a really good music education department. So I said, I'd love to come to that school. Could I study with you on clarinet?
13:57 And he said, I'm not on the clarinet faculty, but I'll make a couple of phone calls and see. and they called me back and said, yeah, they agreed to let me, to let you study clarinet with me. So that was a done deal. I went to Hart School. And in the meantime, at Fredonia, I had met a young lady who I got engaged to and married. My wife Cheryl. And so we both moved to Connecticut. Cheryl got a job.
14:24 She was a year ahead of me. She got a job teaching music. And I went to grad school. and got a job after I graduated from grad school. And this town here in Vernon, Connecticut, needed a teacher for a ninth grade band and a couple of elementary schools. And so I signed up and this job was fantastic. It was a wonderful school system. I had terrific kids.
14:53 It was almost like the dream job. Yeah. And started. Started there, taught there for nine years, and it was a great place to be until it wasn't. They used the R. That sounds like my first ten marriages. No, I'm just kidding. And it was one of the, when I document this in the book, how things came out of left field, and it was just one of those instances where, you know, new superintendent who had a little different idea of how the music department should be run. And at the same time, I was doing the high school, and the marching band was a big part of that. I love marching band.
15:39 I was a big concert band guy, but I loved marching band. And the salary was kind of low for all of the hours that I would have to put in. So I met some phone calls around to local school systems and said, yeah, what do you get? What's your stipend for marching band? And so I got a whole list of things. And I was way at the bottom of the salary scale. So I approached the superintendent.
16:05 I said, hey, all these other towns have this. They're giving $1,000 here. And I was making $250. And all the hours that I put in. And is there anywhere I could get my? Because he's, he, then he came back to me and said, no, he said, actually, it's too late because the contracts have been signed already and so forth and so on. And by the way, I want you to do twice as many football games next year. Oh, wow. Both, yeah.
16:37 Jeez. Yeah. Okay, so now I'm doing twice as much for the same. And at the end of our meeting, he says to me, and if you don't like it, there's the door. Oh, wow. Wow. That's That's really poorly your ship. Let's be in my face. And so I got up, kept my mouth shut, and walked out, and knew that something is not right here. I think I'm going to start looking. And I made a phone call to a friend of mine who was a supervisor of music in a town close to us.
17:16 And he said, you're looking for a job? He says, I have a job opening. Really? Oh, and his junior high band job was open, and he says, you want it? I said, sure. I'll do it. So I had a job within a week after. But I finished a year out, and it was tough leaving.
17:38 I was really close to a lot of the kids. Yeah. That was my first experience. That's going to be the hardest part. You get attached to the kids, and that's got to be just tough, right? Yeah, it really was. the day I made the announcement was like I had nothing
17:54 I didn't expect that there'd be a line of kids coming up to me hugging me and some of them crying you're going to make me cry oh it's just like when that's a chapter in the book you know what I call it a tough day it's a tough day but I went down to this next
18:11 school system was in Bloomfield Connecticut and a terrific music program and I really was looking forward to everything and so forth and so on. And then at the end of the school year, things that go done very well, at the end of the school year, I'm reading in a newspaper that, oh, Bloomfield is closing one of the elementary schools.
18:32 Oh, that's interesting. But then I got wind of the fact that they're going to cut a position from every department in the school in order to make up for the school being closed. and guess who the last hired in the instrumental music department was? Who? Me. Wow. Wow. So I was basically, I got a letter a couple of weeks later saying we were sorry that we have to terminate your contract at the end of the year.
19:11 We really appreciate efforts. I was out of a job. Wow. After that, and during that time, I was watching the news and so forth and so on. I'm watching the fact that computer programming was becoming really big, and especially in the Hartford area, they were hiring computer programmers, and there was a place called a Computer Processing Institute, then six months would give you a, you would be able to get a computer processing computer programming degree. So I talked to my mom and family about it, and they said, why don't you, maybe it's time to kind of shift.
19:50 And in the meantime, I was at, while I was considering this, I was at a third high school. I'd gotten hired by Ellington High School. And I had a real great time there, too. My kids were terrific and so forth and so on. But it was a three-fifths position. So three periods a day. So it wasn't a full-time job. The superintendent came to me and said,
20:13 you keep doing the job you're doing, Jim, and we're going to try to make this full time for you next year. I said, great. But at the end of the next year, the middle of the next year, he came to me and said, we're going to have to cut one of the fifths. Oh, wow. Jeez.
20:28 So this is when we signed up for computer processing institute. And I had to start that in January, and I had to leave the Ellington kids. This was the second year of my Ellington High School. I had to leave them. I felt terrible. So I went to Computer Brossack Institute. I interviewed and got a job at the Hartford.
20:53 I was going to see how this is going to work out. Wow. Now that's insurance? Hartford insurance? Yeah, Hartford is the insurance capital of the world. The Travelers, Ethna, the Hartford were all based in Hartford, and they were hiring. And one of the things they said, we like to hire musicians. We find that musicians make good programmers.
21:13 Oh, okay. Sounds good to me. And we got through the training class that the Hartford started, and pretty soon I was out on the floor working, and I was working with adults all of a sudden. And about salaries, I was making $18,500, and this was after, this was at Ellington High School, after 12 years of teaching with a master's degree I was making 18-5. Okay? I started at entry level at the Hartford
21:51 for 18-7. This was the entry-level salary. So you can see the discrepancy in salaries between education and the private sector. It was just, wow,
22:07 okay. So I enjoyed my job working with the adults. I was still teaching private lessons, so I still had my finger in teaching kids and so forth. I got through the, I was 10 years I was doing this. I became a team leader. I became a programmer analyst. I was doing very well. And then we started to get in wind that software was getting so powerful that it looked like they didn't need programmers anymore.
22:39 Yeah, crazy, huh? The people that we were supporting were actually doing the programming through the software that they had on their own desk. But you could see in about three or four years I was going to be out of a job. And so I decided to look for something else. I found I became the executive secretary of the Connecticut Music Educators Conference here in Connecticut. They called the CMEA.
23:09 Cadetic Music Education Association. I did that for three years. I worked out of my home, which was great because I could put my daughter on the bus and so forth. She was in elementary school at the time. And all this time, Cheryl was still teaching in public school. And she's telling me, things are changing. And I said, how? She says, if you're going back to teaching, you'll find out.
23:32 Okay. And this alludes a little bit to what we were talking about before. parents would be starting to become different in the way they were supporting their kids. I still had a few years to find out about that. But CMEA sponsored a showing of the movie that was new at that year, Mr. Holland's opus. Oh, yeah. And this movie, Richard Dreyfus and all of this great Olympia Dukakis, and all those really great cast.
24:08 So it was a black tie showing in one of the little theaters that we had, wine and cheese and all this kind of stuff. I sat there and watched this movie, and I started seeing things that had happened to me in my career. We're happening to Mr. Holland. And the ending to that movie just inspired me so much. He had had this clarinet student, back when she was young and she was struggling and so forth so he had he worked
24:42 really hard with her and she finally got it and then went through the 30-year careers that he had and they they had a huge saying goodbye for mr. Holland because he got laid off yeah and they the governor showed up at this big event packed auditorium, his orchestra on the stage, alumni, kids. And the governor walks in, she was the girl that was the clarinet student that he had years ago that had so many problems that he helped. She was now the governor of the state. That just blew me away.
25:28 Yeah. She got up there and talked about how he, if it wasn't for him, she would probably be where he was. And she said, Holland, you have touched the lives of everyone sitting in this auditor. And that really just got to me. And when I left, we all were in tears when that movie ended. And when I left that movie, I knew I had to go back. I had to go back.
25:57 Yeah. So I started, I started looking for a job. I submitted my resignation to CMEA. And I got a part-time job in a rural town. But it was a nice bunch of kids and so forth and so on. But that didn't very long last very long either. They cut my position at the end of the year. You had some luck, man.
26:22 Yeah. I'm thinking to myself, I know there's something out there for me. I'm going to keep going because I really love what I'm doing. I love teaching the kids. and so forth. And I ended up, through a friend of mine, finding out about this job in the town of Manchester. And the town of Manchester was like the next town over before I live. And they needed an instrumental elementary teacher to fill in for the last half of the year. So I went and I did that. It was a long-term supposition. I really liked it. I figured maybe I get my foot in the door.
27:01 And sure enough, they offered me a part-time job the next year to do some elementary and instrumental teaching. And then eventually, in another year or two, the middle school job opened up. And so I took that. And then I was in Manchester for the last 17 years of my career. Ah, you finally found a place that didn't keep playing on. That's good. It was the last time I had to land on my feet. That's good. That's good.
27:32 And maybe this is a testament that we need to do more funding of schools, more funding and payment of teachers. We've seen different reports over the years to the last decade or more. Teachers that are having to work three jobs just to be teachers, you know, and really struggling. I remember my mom would, she'd call me often and be like, yeah, I just left the craft store, spent $250 at the craft store to make my fourth graders all happy. And I'm like, well, that's great.
28:02 The school takes care of you and reimburses you for that. Because I'm using the corporate reimbursement. She goes, yeah, that's not, that's out of my pocket. And I'm like, that's not fair at all. That's not right. And she did that a lot. Teachers love their kids. They're willing to spend their own damn money.
28:20 And the Air Force, you know, given we like our military service people and stuff, but the Pentagon doesn't have to have a bake sale to try and raise money to buy F-16s or whatever, right? but our teachers do. What the hell is going on? And I think we can seize to how bad our society has gotten by uneducated people. It's really bad. And it almost, I walk around nowadays. I don't know if you ever saw the movie Idiocracy.
28:46 But I just feel like I'm on the set of Idiocracy. If you, if you haven't, you should go because it's becoming a documentary with 2026. But it basically, this guy goes into the future somehow and find, that the world is just gone stupid. And even the craziness you see in our White House the last two years, they have going on, the USC fights and stuff. They have going on on the movie. And it's almost like the fictional movie has become a documentary.
29:15 You get a chance to watch it, but the problem is you'll see idiocracy everywhere you go now. But yeah, a lot of uneducated people. I talked to people and I was talking to people. What if I don't like what's going on today's politics? I'm like, get out in protest. raise your voice, share awareness. And they're like, I don't understand how to do, how to protest. I'm like, you're an American.
29:38 This is supposed to be part of our fabric. We were launched with the Tea Party. You shouldn't do anything illegal like maybe the Tea Party, but protest. Get out there. Share knowledge. Too many people are just asleep at the wheel. But education is really important. If you don't understand history, you're doomed to repeat it.
29:57 Yeah, that's for sure. They cut all those classes in history like civics and history classes and gym. It's interesting. It just jogged my memory for a minute. One of the other books that I ended up using and writing my book, I found a book called Thank You for Teaching by Mary Zia. And it was a book of all quotations from people about teachers. And I found some really, really great.
30:28 great quotations in there. So at the end of some of the chapters, I'll put one of these quotes in. And then I ended up finding quotations in newspapers and things about teaching. I found just referring to the first quote that I use is by, that I saw at an old video of a young person's concert that Eric Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein used to do back in the 60s that they used to broadcast. And Bernstein said at one of the concerts which was about teaching, he said, and quoting him, teaching is probably the noblest profession in the world, the most unselfish, difficult, and honorable profession. But it is the most underappreciated, underrated, underpaid, and underpraised profession in the world. And I thought that, I said, that's going to go in the beginning of my book, which you think.
31:27 But so, you know, there were moments in my, and one of the reasons that I, that I, I expanded the title to say, teaching and learning during a career was because I was finding that I was learning as well as teaching. I was learning from my students. And there's, there's a wonderful story. I'd love to tell. Please do, if you want. The, I had, I was in Manchester and I was one of the elementary. School, Manchester is a very diversified community.
32:01 Just about every ethnic race you could think of, and I loved that. I loved teaching kids of all ethnicities. And I had these two fifth-grade African-American clarinet students at one of the elementary schools. So we had a class together. So I'm taking them. And then one day they asked me, and said, Mr. Kleiner, what kind of music do you listen to? Oh.
32:25 I said, I like classical. I listened to some jazz. I like Broadway shows. And then I asked them, what kind of music do you listen to? And they turned to me and they said, you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know.
32:42 And I said, well, I said, no, I'd be interested. I said, I gave me a sheet of paper. And I said, write down the 10 favorite groups or singers that you like. Oh, okay. They got a little excited. And they started working out. Oh, yeah.
32:56 No, no, no. Yeah. And they're writing all these people down in groups. And then I'm looking at the group. I'm looking at them. I go, oh. Oh, Alicia Keys. I know her. You know, I heard of her.
33:09 Still cool. Yeah, she's one of my favorites. Kisha Cole, Rihanna, Destiny's Child. It's like I didn't sort of had heard of these. And there's a whole bunch of them. I say, you know what I'm going to do, ladies? I'm going to go out and get a CD of every one of these people. people and I'm going to listen to them and they said no you're not I said yeah I am so the next
33:34 week so that week I went out and I bought a CD of every one of these groups yeah destiny's child bloomed away wow our teacher's cool John legend whoa yeah and I'm listening to a listen and Chris I could stop listening to these CDs I became hooked on R&B. Nice. Well, that's a good thing to be hooked on. Yeah. I got back to their class the next week, and I said,
34:07 ladies, I love these groups. I love these people. They said, no, you, you, they said, show me the CDs. So I went out to my car. I got all the CDs. I put it down. They didn't, they didn't believe you.
34:22 Wait, our teacher's cool. No. Yeah, that's funny. That's just it. I bet that earned some points with them, though, right? Yeah, and I was playing, I had my little portable CD player on them. Let's hear a little bit of Rihanna. Okay, so I put on a track.
34:37 And then the word got around the school. So kids were passing about our room saying, hey, play a little Keisha Cole. You know how to score all the big points, I think you get into that Taylor Swift. Was she around then? No. No, but I ended up, I ended up. I don't know anything. I don't recognize anything.
34:55 We got around the school that Mr. Kleiner was cool. He was cool. Yeah, you're the cool teacher. Do you start showing up to the teacher, the lounge, teacher's lounge with sunglasses and cool hat and maybe a fur coat or something? You're cool now? It's cool with the other teachers. That's what I would do. I'd be like, I'm cool.
35:20 I'm going to sit alone over here. I don't want to be with you on cool teachers. And one more story I want to tell you about. Sure. Something that'll balance all of the bad stuff that included, including getting in the middle of a food fight in the cafeteria. Wow. That's an experience every teaser I'm sure doesn't have. I hope not.
35:42 And getting sprayed with a fire extinguisher. Oh, you did that? Was that intentional or accident? That was my chapter of the report card incident. Oh. And is that in the book? so people can read it. Yeah, that's in the book.
35:57 Well, folks, you've got to buy the book to read it and all that good stuff. You don't want to read that. But I had actually had, when I left that initial town out west, down out east of Connecticut, on my first job back from working in the private sector, and they caught my position. I got called down. My last day there, I got called down to the auditorium, and I walked in, and the auditorium was full. and the whole school was there. And the principal that was on the stage,
36:29 some of them may be, and kids were on the stage that I had been teaching. And this was my Mr. Holland's opus. Oh. They came, they gave me a plaque. Oh, wow. Beautiful plaque.
36:43 They gave me a t-shirt that the kids had signed and so forth. And that was what they did for me on my last day. And going home, driving home, I'm saying, now I know her Mr. That's awesome. What a great dream to live. You saw the movie and now here you are. Yeah. That is so magical. I've been a CEO of my life since 18. I've, and I had, and I've never had anybody do that to me when I left the room.
37:16 I don't know. I officially left the company before firing everybody, laying everyone off. But no one has ever done that when I left the room. There's a back when COVID was here the first time, there was a U.S. commander of the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and highly decorated gentlemen. And he was one of the first ships that contracted COVID and it started raging through the ships because on those aircraft carriers, everybody's within inches of each other. So it passes quick. And they're having problems because it was it was risking that everyone would get sick, people would die. And, of course, this huge aircraft carrier would be disabled in America's defense and offense. And so it was taking two lines to go to the chain of command. And so finally he wrote a letter directly to the Pentagon.
38:09 And the Trump administration and the first iteration got a hold of it. And they were trying to deny that COVID was really a big deal and just try and hide from it first, if everyone remembers. And so Donald Trump started calling him out on Twitter and saying he was an awful guy and making a big deal of nothing. And this man's just, he was trying to get his, he was in Guam and he was trying to get his authorization for the Pentagon to offload the six sick members and put them in a hotel so that he could get, he could eliminate the stuff off the ship. And he was trying to save lives too because people were dying back then. We didn't know how to deal with it. We were just in the very beginning. And anyway, he was relieved of his command.
38:54 It was a whole kerfuffle. And I remember we had him on the show. He wrote a book that was really amazing. And I remember when he left the show. In fact, I just saw the video, or when he left his ship to relinquish his command, his whole, everyone on the ship, they chanted his name, clap for him and just regaled how great he was as he walked off. the ship. And I remember telling him when he was on the show, I'm like, I've never walked out of a rumor company where people still clapped. Maybe they thought about doing it because I was leaving, but not to that. So that's just wonderful. You had that experience, man. Really wonderful. What do you
39:33 hope people come away with when they finish the book or read the book? I'd like people to appreciate what what educators do for their kids. Yeah. I really would. And very often, I had the same experience of using my own money at times and so forth, because we just loved their kids so much. And so I hope that they get that feeling. And I hope people that are youngsters that are thinking about teaching kind of get maybe inspired a little bit, that, yeah, you're going to have some bad times. And in any job, you're going to have that. But there's always these incredible, wonderful experiences that you're going to have. And if you learn along the way from things that happen, that's the best way to do it.
40:20 And I certainly tried to do that along the way, as never make the same mistake twice. And hopefully that maybe a parent will read this book and say to themselves, I'd really, maybe I should back off my son's teacher and let him decide what to do in this situation. Because that's their job. They know what they're doing because I had that experience later in my career where parents were trying to control what was going on in school a little bit too much. Leave it to the educators. They know what they're doing.
40:59 Yeah, they do. They definitely know what they're doing. Thank you very much for coming to show. Give us your dot-coms as we go out so people can find you there. Okay. It's landing on my feet.com. That's my website. and you can find my book there.
41:16 Thank you very much, Jim, for coming the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, and thanks for us for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss. Pick of his book, wherever fine books are sold. Landing on my feet, teaching and learning during a career in education by James Kleiner.
41:34 Thanks so on us for tuning in. Go to Goodreads. We already said that. Yeah, Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com, YouTube.com, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning. Consuming too much of the Chris Waw Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed.
42:08 Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Faw show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not an endorsement. or review of any kind.
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